Page 73 of Tricks for Free

The doorbell rang. Megan sat on the couch, picking up the towel she kept there and wrapping it around her head in a quick, practiced motion. The snakes, apparently conditioned to keep still in the dark, coiled and stopped moving, which was good, since otherwise the towel would have been pulsing like something out of a horror movie.

“Actually, it’s time for us to eat pizza,” said Cylia, walking calmly past me to the door. Sam got up and darted down the hall to my bedroom, out of sight.

I offered Fern a quick, tight smile, and went to the kitchen for plates.

The thing about riding gallantly into battle is that unless something is actively trying to kill you right now, it’s probably a good idea to eat first. We fell upon those two pizzas like we were starving—which, to be honest, several of us were. It had been a long time since our gingerbread at Lowryland, and baked goods do not a balanced diet make.

Megan, despite having mouse-eating snakes attached to her head, is a vegetarian; out of respect for her dietary needs, one of the pizzas was a virtual garden of plants that can be baked in an oven without turning completely disgusting. The other pizza was a meat-lover’s special. Megan ate the first, Fern ate the second, and I slapped two pieces together to form a perfectly balanced sandwich, a trick which Sam and Cylia quickly emulated.

(Cylia had also been smart enough to order several two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew to go with the food. Cylia was rapidly approaching the status of “my favorite.”)

For a little while, there was no room for conversation: there was only room for chewing, something that’s universal across all species, no matter what their diets entail. Megan stole bits of sausage from the meat-lover’s pizza and fed it to her hair while chewing on her own veggie-enriched slice; Sam double-fisted his pizza slice sandwiches, eating with a speed and efficiency which I frankly admired, even as I kept a hand free for my drink.

The pizzas were nearly gone when Sam paused, hiccupped, and turned human again. We all blinked at him.

“Huh,” said Cylia, who had only seen him in his fūri form. “You’re actually kinda cute.”

“Thanks?” said Sam.

“I think he’s cute both ways,” I said, earning myself a quick grin.

“Does this mean my luck’s back to normal?” asked Sam.

“Not quite,” said Cylia. “I know you’re going to glare at me, but if I were you, I’d avoid touching Annie for a while longer. Give it a day. Most of the luck I lathered onto you was good, because why the hell bother starting someone out with a big load of bad—seems to me you’ve got enough bad going already—and now you’re starting to pick up ambient luck, which is more mixed. Once your shell gets back to normal, you’ll be safe to do whatever you want.”

“By then, hopefully I won’t suck as hard,” I said.

Fern choked on her pizza.

I blinked at her before I felt myself turn bright red. “Oh, my God, you have a filthy mind,” I squawked, and threw a napkin at her.

That was the trigger. We were tired, we were tense, and we were about to go into a fight against people whose abilities we didn’t fully know or understand. People get weird when they’re looking down the barrel of something like that. Fern batted the napkin away and threw her pizza crust at me. I snatched it out of the air and threw it back, only to be hit in the side of the face by a pillow flung by Megan. She was laughing, and her snakes seemed to be doing the same, their mouths gaping open in silent serpentine smiles.

Cylia grabbed another pillow, holding it in front of herself and doing an admirable job of compacting her long limbs into a complicated curl. “I’m fragile!” she yelped.

Sam hit her with an empty soda bottle.

The living room descended into chaos. Fern grabbed a pillow in each hand and bounded into the air, dropping her personal density until she was practically floating. Sam’s tail wrapped tight around her ankle, and she yelped before she realized that he was swinging her at Megan. Her yelp transformed into a maniacal laugh, both pillows raised to strike. Megan ducked but still got a mouthful of upholstery for her trouble, Fern aiming low to avoid hitting her glasses.

I laughed too, dropping to the floor and beginning to chuck wadded-up napkins every which way, keeping the air full of projectiles, which Fern kept batting aside in her determined quest to smack Megan a second time. Cylia flicked her fingers every time it looked like my napkins were going to hit her, sending them careening in odd directions as some gust of wind from Fern’s flight or other atmospheric disturbance knocked them out of true. My aim hadn’t been that bad since I was a very small child, but I didn’t manage to land a hit on her once.

It was fantastic. Play is an essential part of learning what the body is capable of, and while we were all just blowing off steam, I was learning more of what our group was tactically capable of than I could possibly have asked. The only factor that was missing was Megan’s stony gaze, and even when Fern was hitting her with the pillows, she was being careful not to knock our resident gorgon’s glasses off. Which mattered.

“Time-out!” I called.

Sam stopped swinging Fern. Robbed of her momentum, she drifted slowly down toward the floor. Cylia peeked out from behind her pillow.

“Truce?” she asked.

“Not quite,” I said. “Megan, I know you can’t paralyze Fern. What about Cylia and Sam?”

“I don’t know,” she said, blinking at me as she wiped a smear of tomato sauce off one cheek. Her hair writhed and settled, a few locks drawing back in curious curves. “I’ve never looked directly at a jink or a fūri before.”

“Got it.” I looked at Sam and Cylia. Cylia, who in her own weird way knew more about the cryptid community than Sam did—he had been raised by his human grandmother, who had always done her best, but who had been missing some essential facts about his biology—grimaced.

“I don’t know either,” she said, in a tone which implied that she really wasn’t looking forward to the next part. “I don’t suppose we can say ‘probably’ and leave it at that?”

“Not the best plan,” I said. “If we need to get you sunglasses, we should probably know that before things get messy.”